Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).

But, this:

> Radically open

> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.

I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.

When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.

Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.

The average user (non-tech oriented) doesn't really think about or care that much about openness. This is the kind of user who posts disclaimers on their Facebook wall saying that Facebook is not allowed to use their content.

Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

As you imply, this is a bit meaningless for people who don't want their posts used for AI, because anyone can grab all data pretty easily (at least for now).

But, AI aside, this is so much better for a lively ecosystem - 3rd party apps, bots (the fun and useful kind), research, etc. A lots of things simply died when Musk decided effectively end the API program [1].

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3layuzbti6s2x

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... == https://archive.ph/ikPOk

> until the average user is completely aware of things like this.

The average user doesn’t care.

> The average user doesn’t care.

The average user still gets surprised when a website "steals" (knows) their IP address and make some drama around this "leak", not realizing that any network communication makes this possible.

So that's what makes me think it's plausible that they might care that their whole account data can be exported by any internet rando.

(EDIT: All this is of course in the context of my bubble, where the non-techy users are mostly artists and streamers, because those are the ones I've noticed migrating to Bluesky. I realize you might have had a different subset of people in mind when responding to my comment.)

As a reminder, the Twitter APIpocalypse already happened in 2012, long before Musk... and some of the people now at BlueSky might have been behind it ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550625

At least, that's also why we got Mastodon...

Saying bluesky has won seems a bit pre-emptive, especially as its less than 2% the size of threads.

Yes. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b... stands though there were a few more waves since (starting with the Brazil situation): https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

> Bluesky released a statement today about data use [0] - saying they will not use your data for "Generative AI" (surely in response to X's recent change to say they will).

Yea, like how WhatsApp promised they wouldn't share data with Facebook;

A promise obviously has 0 value...

I know a lot of artists who hate the idea of their work being used to train generative models, and I can’t blame them tbh. That being said, most of them know that they can’t prevent that from happening unless they want to stop posting their work anywhere public.

HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.